Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read Online Free

beside me. She wasn’t smiling, and the levity of last night was gone.
    “Do you want to hear what’s going on?”
    Yes. “Can I do anything about it?”
    “Not really.”
    “Then nope.   Could you do something else?” My notebook was back in my go-bag, but if I gave her permission then she could access and replay the Teatime Anarchist’ implanted sensory-net “download” of me writing in it. I did and her eyes widened as she processed it.
    “No freaking way! Kitsune’s back?”
    “I don’t know.” I closed my eyes and leaned back. “It might have been just a dream. I really, really hope it was, but I’m going to ask Chakra to check me out.”
    Shell went quiet for a minute.
    “No agencies admit to catching up to him, at least the files I have legit access to don’t have a whisper. Do you think I should…” She made the offer tentatively, and I opened my eyes with a smile. The fact that she even asked approval to perform cyber hackery was serious progress.
    “No. If he is back, then it’s up to Blackstone to tell us if there’s anything we need to know.   But thanks.”
    “So what do we do now?”
    “Can you find the town? If it’s a real place, looking for that water tower might help you find it.”
    “Did it look at all like a military base?”
    I gave it serious consideration, shook my head. “But Midwest, maybe? The kind of place with one stoplight you find in the middle of hundreds of miles of cornfield? Not that I saw any corn, but it’s spring.”
    “Maybe, if the town burning—and disappearing—is happening now .” She laced the qualifying statement with doubt.
    “Yeah…” I closed my eyes again. Last year’s Kitsune dreams—all two of them—had never been literal, but nothing as mundane as buildings had shown up in them, either. I wanted to shrug it off, but as different as it had been from the others, it still had that same realer-than-real clarity. And although I’d felt no sense of alarm while I’d been in the dream, a weight was growing, cold and heavy in my chest. Not quite panic but close, a growing gut-certainty of looming awfulness. What I’d seen was real.
    With no more from me to go on, Shell faded out (she’d added a nice whispery sound effect and a feel like a puff of cool mist on my skin). Off to play the Ghost in the Machine, she’d shake the data-built foundations of cyberspace. If an image even remotely matching what I’d seen existed she’d find it.
    Why did I feel like that wouldn’t be a good thing?
    ----
    We could have landed at the airport, but doing a loaded drop was always good practice and the pallet had to come home anyway for repacking. We bailed out high over Chicago. The storms had hit us here, too, but the major cells passed to the south and east.
    Looking down at Grant Park, I almost couldn’t have said that the Green Man had ever been there. After a lot of debate, the business-owners on Michigan Avenue had won and most of the dense thickets of trees left over from his last attack had been removed. Ozma had “walked” a bunch of them into orderly rows along the avenues and a couple of groves were preserved. The Atlas Memorial and Buckingham Fountain had been restored.
    With the load blocking my line of sight, Tsuris guided me down for a perfect insertion through the Dome’s bay doors, where Shell welcomed us wearing her new Shellbot shell.
    “Off the clock, everybody,” I said as Crash, Ozma, and Grendel unclipped. “Don’t leave the Dome. Five hours, then we inventory and repack the pallet and go-bags.” Some CAI teams let their staff pack their kits but not ours, especially since Lei Zi had taken over as field leader; when we went away from Chicago we had to know that we had everything we needed.
    Crash saluted and everybody else just nodded; we all knew the system. I stayed to watch the bay doors close above us, and Shell and I headed downstairs. She didn’t say anything in the elevator or the hallway, waiting for my apartment